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REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE
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“Relationships of Ownership: Art and Theft in Bob Dylan’s 1960s Trilogy”
Michael Rodgers
May 21, 2012
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Rodgers, Michael. “Relationships of Ownership: Art and Theft in Bob Dylan’s 1960s
Trilogy” Imaginations 3:1 (2011): Web (date accessed) 17-29. DOI: 10.17742/IMAGE.
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MICHAEL RODGERS
RELATIONSHIPS OF OWNERSHIP:
ART AND THEFT IN
BOB DYLAN’S
1960S’ TRILOGY
MICHAEL RODGERS, UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE
Abstract
Bob Dylan’s corpus is one continually engaged with
appropriation and pilfering. This paper will look,
predominantly, at three songs from his 1960s’ trilogy
– ‘She Belongs To Me’ from Bringing It All Back Home
(1965), ‘Visions of Johanna’ from Blonde on Blonde
(1966), and ‘Desolation Row’ from Highway 61
Revisited (1965) – arguing that, in these songs, Dylan
problematizes the interrelationship between art, theft,
and ownership. I argue that, similar to the urban artist
Banksy, Dylan challenges, toys with, and appropriates
cultural images in order to continually question the
concept of proprietorship whilst rescuing cultural
images from esoterica and attempting to put them back
into the public domain.
Résumé
L’œuvre de Bob Dylan continue à être sujette à
l’appropriation et au pillage. Cet article évalue,
principalement, trois chansons qui font partie de la
trilogie d’albums parue pendant les années 60 – She
Belongs To Me de l’album Bringing It All Back Home
(1965), Visions of Johanna de Blonde on Blonde (1966),
et Desolation Row de Highway 61 Revisited (1965).
Je cherche soutenir qu’à travers ces chansons Dylan
propose des nouveaux problèmes quant à l’interrelation
entre l’art, le vol et la propriété. Mon argument est que,
à l’instar de l’artiste urbain Banksy, Dylan joue avec
les images culturelles et se les appropries en même
temps qu’il les met à l’épreuve afin de mettre en doute
le concept de propriété. À travers ses œuvres, Dylan
récupère ces images à partir de leur marginalité, pour
les replacer dans un espace publique.
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RELATIONSHIPS OF OWNERSHIP: ART AND THEFT IN BOB DYLAN’S 1960S’ TRILOGY
In the sleeve note to Bringing It All Back Home (1965),
Bob Dylan, in his Ginsbergian free-form poem, claims that
“the Great books’ve been written. the Great sayings have
all been said” (6). Dylan, however, seems too self-assured
an artist to accept this idea, too fertile an artist to accept
the finality of artistic output. Instead, Dylan appears to
rebel against the notion of closure through interweaving
the themes of art and theft—letting (what seem to be)
apparent antonyms complement one another as a way
of creating new work. This paper will argue that Dylan’s
corpus challenges, toys with, and appropriates cultural
images, in order to continually question the concept of
ownership. Rather than be content with letting images
set, Dylan seems to avoid allowing artistic icons, images,
and rebuses to stagnate or become fixed and, instead,
subjects them to radical metamorphoses and proffers
phantasmagorical alternatives or adaptations. What is
problematic, however, is whether the radically altered
forms he presents belong to Dylan himself, act simply
as tools for his poetic expression, or are an ensemble
of others’ work. This paper will look, predominantly, at
three songs from his 1960s’ trilogy (“She Belongs To Me”
from Bringing It All Back Home, “Visions of Johanna”
from Blonde on Blonde (1966), and “Desolation Row”
from Highway 61 Revisited (1965)) arguing that,
in these songs, Dylan is theorizing the topics of art,
theft, and ownership.In doing so, I argue that Dylan
appropriates and rescues cultural images from esoterica
and attempts to put them back into the public domain.
For Dylan, however, this accessibility does not equate
to easiness. Although he asks his listeners to work hard
for particular references, importantly, he rewards them
if they are prepared to do so. In allowing his listeners
to contribute to the songs through their own cultural
knowledge, in defamiliarizing and lampooning normal
perspectives and preconceptions, and in modifying
images, Dylan persistently alludes throughout his works
to what he calls “relationships of ownership” in “Gates of
Eden” (1965). As Jonathan Lethem argues, “It becomes
apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation,
allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a
kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across
forms and genres in the realm of cultural production”
(60). Ultimately, I wish to illustrate the extent to which
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • 18
Dylan’s imagistic lyrics are integral to the ways in
which notions of theft and ownership are theorized.
The degree to which Dylan’s songs ‘steal’, or borrow,
can be seen, for example, in the similarities between
“I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine” (1975) and Alfred
Hayes’s poem “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”
(1930), and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1962) and
the ballad of “Lord Randall” (Trager 234). Jon Pareles
details one particularly alert Dylan fan who noticed
numerous references between Love and Theft and
Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza (1991) (1). The
title itself comes from Eric Lott’s study of minstrelsy
(Lethem 59). However, this topic is not always talked
about disparagingly. Often, theft is one equated with
humour, justification, delight even. What is interesting is
MICHAEL RODGERS
that the topics of art and theft appear to be completely
dichotomous—art is something that one makes, creates,
and gives, whereas theft entails taking, stealing, and
appropriating.In this respect,Jonathan Lethem argues that:
The cardinal difference between gift and commodity
exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond
between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity
leaves no necessary connection…Art that matters
to us – which moves the heart, or revives the soul,
or delights the senses, or offers courage for living,
however we choose to describe the experience – is
received as a gift is received. (65)
Art theft is a well-known and not uncommon crime, yet
the possibility of art appropriating, or stealing, other art
is even more contentious. When art starts to thieve (for
example, when it harnesses something already existing
through pastiche or bricolage such as in ‘Pop Art’), it
is often viewed negatively (as if its worth is somehow
impure or mongrelized). The law of intellectual property
may protect a work of art through copyright or patents,
yet the cerebral concept itself cannot be subjected to
proprietorship. As Pareles argues, “Courts are not the
best place for aesthetic distinctions” (2). Indeed, for
reader-response criticism, once something is published
it can be said to belong to the public domain at large. In
light of this, what seems crucial is the interrelationship
between art, theft, and ownership. Are there limits to
what can be stolen? Should we steal if it has beneficial
or aesthetic merit? Are artists exempt from moral law?
Art, Stealing, and Morality
The relationship between art and morality has been an
ongoing topic since the time of the ancient Greeks and
is still being passionately contended in the present day
by critics such as Noël Carroll, Tom Sorell, and Rosalind
Hursthouse.1 There are two arguments. One is that art,
in its representation of real life, should be bound by the
same moral laws that govern our own world. Novels that
present evil figures who wreak havoc only to be thwarted
by the protagonist or be subjected to some kind of divine
retribution have been pervasive because, essentially,
they provide us with some kind of moral lesson (“this
will be the result if you act without a moral schema”).
Such didactic fiction, however, sits alongside other
(predominantly twentieth-century) novels that present
ambiguous denouements and “let-offs” for culprits—
which is a lot harder for readers to deal with (arguably,
because the moral laws that we are governed by do not
take effect). Aristotle, espousing the opposing view that
literature has a beneficial role to play in our lives, argues
that literature allows the temptation in our lives to be
alleviated so that we can live out or experience such
moral deviance. It can be argued that the realm of art—
like that of comedy, say—is exempt from moral law. After
all, although we have censorship and bowdlerisation
for books that contain questionable material (Lady
Chatterley’s Lover [1928] or Lolita [1955] come to
mind), we do not have (at least in the West) something
resembling the world depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1948), where characters, or authors for that matter, are
suppressed in what they are allowed to write about; in
other words, we have no moral criteria for what a text
should contain. Such freedom of speech allows writers
and musicians to write about, enact even, scenarios
that would otherwise be forbidden in the real world.
A Dylan song that amalgamates the themes of art, theft,
ownership, and morality is “She Belongs to Me” from
Bringing It All Back Home. The image on the front of the
album cover, containing a distinctive lens-type framed
shot of Dylan and a mysterious female, surrounded
by a menagerie of magazines, albums, and paintings,
serves to immediately articulate the album’s concern
with recursion or mise en abyme (the idea of “pictures
within pictures”) — something that foregrounds the
song’s relationship with theft. “She Belongs to Me” is
the second song on the album and contains five six-line
verses concerning a female artist and another figure
(referred to only as “you”) who is in complete admiration
of her. The lyrics of the first two verses are as follows:
She’s got everything she needs
She’s an artist, she don’t look back
She’s got everything she needs
She’s an artist, she don’t look back
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
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And paint the daytime black
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees (Dylan 1965, L1-12)
The use of anaphora in the first verse (repeating the
pronoun “she” at the start of the first five lines) is partly
due to Dylan’s appropriation of the Blues’ form and
serves to highlight just how much an impact the woman
makes on the speaker — which is somewhat ironic given
how he or she seems to lampoon the extent to which
the other figure covets the woman. The fact that ‘she’
is repeated so often serves to cement her anonymity
and also reads as a highly possessive and misogynistic
pronoun (an idea strengthened by the song’s title). Dylan
seems to suggest that, as an artist, the woman appears to
have everything she needs; that is, there is not anything
in the world that does not belong to her because of
her occupation. Given that he tells us “she don’t look
back”, Dylan establishes a relationship between her
artistic prowess and a visionary element. It seems that
only banal people would be bothered looking at the past
or be content with past achievements.2 It also suggests
(but negates) having to “run from the law” — something
that adds to this feeling of artistic assuredness and selfpossession. Dylan then alludes to the artistic technique of
chiascuro, given that “she can paint the daytime black”
but refers to it in such a way that it simultaneously reads
simply as hyperbolic description of her artistic powers
in being able to transform night into day and vice versa.
The speaker goes on to describe the gradual reduction
in height of the other figure (starting off “standing” and
ending on his “knees”) which may suggest genuflection
(an idea that is linked to the “bow” and “salute” in the
last verse). This lionizing of the woman is preceded by
the line, “proud to steal her anything she sees”. What is
interesting here is that the only things that could really
be stolen (in a traditional context) would be physical
objects, yet the “anything” seems to include, literally,
anything she sees — things such as landscapes, people,
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • 20
and weather (which cannot literally be stolen). The fact
that he “ends up peeking through her keyhole”, although
suggesting sexual innuendo, seems instead to simply
demonstrate his curiosity at what changes or adaptations
the woman will make to these things once inside her
workroom (which, presumably, he cannot gain access to).
The third verse strengthens the woman’s seeming
assuredness but also raises the issue of consequence:
She never stumbles
She’s got no place to fall
She never stumbles
She’s got no place to fall
She’s nobody’s child
The Law can’t touch her at all
(Dylan 1965, L13-18)
MICHAEL RODGERS
The suggestion that “she’s got no place to fall” might
appear to be foreboding whereby the need for poise, and
a lack of safety (suggestive of tightrope walking), may
impede her ability or, alternatively, suggest an element
of hubris. Apparently birthless (“She’’s nobody’s child”),
and otherworldly as a consequence of her lack of ties,
alongside being outside the law, this female artist seems
to have an empyrean status. The fact that Dylan gives
her immunity from the “Law” (something important
enough to deserve a capital letter) furthers the extent
to which she appears to be of a higher order than the
other figure, yet, ultimately, she is still possessed by
Dylan himself through the creative act. Presumably, the
other figure, governed by society’s virtuous Christian
morality (where “Thou Shalt Not Steal” has been
imbibed), will have consequences to deal with at a
later date because of his actions. An element of selfreflexivity emerges as we progress through the song,
since the idea that art is situated outside the moral realm
sits alongside the suggestion that art may be thought
of as recursive ownership (the addressee who steals for
the woman and whom she “collects”, the speaker who
claims to possess the woman, Dylan’s creation of the
speaker).3 The toing and froing between different claims
to ownership, of course, even extends to the listener,
who is in doubt as to whether he or she can be said
to lay claim to their own imaginative conception of the
woman. The idea of the buck of ownership stopping at
Dylan is a curious one, something forever problematized
through both cover versions and creative reimagining.
A similar song that interweaves the themes of art, theft
and morality is “4th Time Around” from Blonde on
Blonde, a song which is notable for the speaker’s inability
to understand reciprocal exchange or the acts of giving
and receiving. The idea that “4th Time Around” might
be a parody or homage to The Beatles’ “Norwegian
Wood (This Bird Has Flown” (1965), given their similar
melody and lyrical quality, is suggested by Trager (195)
and Wilentz (118). If true, it continues the tradition
of Dylan borrowing when comprising his own songs.
“4th Time Around” contains five nine-line verses that
again focus on an unnamed woman but, this time,
includes the ‘I’ of the speaker. Concerning an anonymous
trio’s love triangle — a speaker’s remembrance of a
break-up with a past lover (of which this is perhaps
the fourth occurrence) — the song is notable for
its vitriol and how much the speaker acts the clown:
When she said
“Don’t waste your words, they’re just lies”
I cried she was deaf
And she worked on my face until breaking my eyes
Then said, “What else you got left?”
It was then that I got up to leave
But she said, “Don’t forget
Everybody must give something back
For something they get”
I stood there and hummed
I tapped on her drum and asked her how come
And she buttoned her boot
And straightened her suit
Then she said, “Don’t get cute”
So I forced my hands in my pockets
And felt with my thumbs
And gallantly handed her
My very last piece of gum (Dylan 1966, L1-18)
In the first verse, we are told that the speaker “got up
to leave” in the midst of their argument, hums, taps on
her drum and asks “How come?” after being told that
“Everybody must give something back/For something
they get.” These childish responses are amplified when
the speaker tells us that he “gallantly handed her [his]
last piece of gum” (Dylan 1966, 6, 10, 11, 17-18) in
response to her assertion about exchange. The speaker’s
offering acts as a cruel reply that illustrates the extent to
which he thinks he will solve the reciprocal conundrum,
but instead, it only serves to infuriate her. Indeed, it
is specifically this lack of understanding reciprocal
exchange that, ostensibly, makes the speaker morally
reprehensible. As a result, we can perhaps infer that
what the speaker has received far outweighs his paltry
gift. After the woman chokes on the gum and falls to
the floor, the speaker decides to cover her up, looking
through her drawer, “filling up [his] shoe” and bringing
21 • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • IMAGINATIONS
RELATIONSHIPS OF OWNERSHIP: ART AND THEFT IN BOB DYLAN’S 1960S’ TRILOGY
it to the addressee, presumably female, again referred to
only as “you.” The last verse, dwelling on the speaker’s
relationship with this new woman, mentions that he
“never took much.” Again, the speaker seems to suggest
that he is one who continually pilfers, conveying an
image of someone completely reprehensible. However,
this image is also one heavily distorted by boyish
naiveté and Socratic irony and actually works in such
a way as to make the whole affair extremely humorous.
It may be that the speaker is acting as raisonneur for
Dylan’s peculiar relationship to ownership and artistic
licence. In the song, the speaker realises that he has
left his shirt and goes back to retrieve it (has this been
given and then thought better of or is the realization
post-coital?). He asks for some expensive rum, is
refused, but then steals from the woman’s drawer. In
the final verse, when he returns to the new lover, the
speaker appears to give this new woman the previous
lover’s money (“I filled up my shoe and brought it to
you”). He then details never “taking much,” not asking
for her help, and chastising the new lover for wanting
support from him. The idea of the new lover’s image
being “supported” by the previous lover (albeit by
“Jamaican rum”), something that the elliptical silence
seems to suggest (“I tried to make sense”), demonstrates
a lack of understanding related to receiving and giving.
As previously mentioned, the speaker’s feigned naiveté
has worked well in being able to mask just how morally
reprehensible he appears to be and in avoiding having
to lose what is his. However, this feigning does not mask
the seeming epiphany he has when he sees the picture
of his new lover. His silence, his ‘trying to make sense’
of the picture, amalgamates the themes of art, theft,
reciprocity, and morality. What must be kept in mind,
however, is that the song itself, something that moves us
as a piece of art, can be thought of as Dylan’s gift (related
to what Lethem calls “gift economy”). In this light,
Dylan escapes accusations of siding wholeheartedly
with a suspect speaker given that the song acts as artistic
compensation for the kleptomania of the speaker.
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • 22
Appropriating the Image
Dylan’s concern with theft extends not only to issues
of belonging and possessiveness but also to the artistic
image itself. “Visions of Johanna,” the third song from
Blonde on Blonde, is arguably Dylan’s most poetic
composition, referred to by the former British Poet
Laureate Andrew Motion as “the best lyric song ever
written” (Burns 23), and is distinctive for Dylan’s nasal,
sibilant delivery which serves as a kind of musical
impasto. Indeed, the song’s relationship with the artistic
image, and its cryptic lyrics, evokes Horace’s idea of ut
pictura poesis. In the fourth verse, the speaker refers to the
image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503-1506):
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like
after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeeze
I can’t find my knees”
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of
the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem
so cruel (Dylan 1966, L29-38)
Having lamented the inside quiddity of museums—places
that, for the speaker, serve only as static compendiums
of life—he quickly conjures up the image of a gallery
(another quiet place for solemn reflection) by introducing
the Mona Lisa.4 Having introduced this well-known
image, Dylan then seems to go off tangentially, referring
to moustaches and knees. However, with the image of
the Mona Lisa only recently given to us, listeners may
be able to make the connection to Marcel Duchamp’s
painting L.H.O.O.Q (1919), which is simply a replica
(or “ready-made”) of the Mona Lisa adorned by a
child-like moustache and goatee-beard. The Duchamp
reference, therefore, can be seen as an example of the
kind of appropriation and reworking of an iconic
image that Dylan perpetrates.5 Further, the apparent
nonsensicality of the “one with the mustache” not being
MICHAEL RODGERS
able to find her knees is again lessened if we remember
that the Mona Lisa canvas extends to just below the
waist. Thus, Dylan has not only introduced the realm of
art explicitly by referring to the Mona Lisa, he has also
subtly alluded to another artist whose preoccupation
was with changing and challenging ubiquitous cultural
images. The fact that Dylan does this so obliquely, almost
at a third degree of separation from the initial image,
allows this new reference to the Mona Lisa to be seen as
yet another reworking of an already appropriated image
— allowing Dylan’s own objective to be articulated
through hybridizing or adopting two existing cultural
markers and making something new. In this respect, it
could be said that Dylan avoids any accusations of theft
given the obliqueness of the allusions. Dylan’s allusion
to Duchamp here is subtle, yet if the listener is prepared
to work for it, he or she is rewarded a rich bounty of
meaning. For example, in referring to Duchamp and the
Surrealists, artists who “believed that objects in the world
possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity…dulled by
everyday use and utility” (Lethem 62), we can perhaps
determine what this verse of “Visions of Johanna” is
“getting at” is the ability to look at the world differently
and defamiliarise, critique even, our normal reactions to
it. In the line succeeding the Duchamp reference — “Oh,
jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule”
- it again appears cryptic enough to suggest oblique
meaning. The situation that the verse places us in —
looking at art in some kind of gallery inhabited where
women are being critiqued — evokes T.S Eliot’s “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), specifically the
refrain in which Prufrock refers to the “women [who]
come and go/Talking of Michelangelo” (Eliot 11). Just
like the cruel lampooning of these women’s assumed
or ostensible knowledge in “Prufrock,” Dylan seems to
appropriate Eliot’s well-known image yet appears to
use it briefly before hybridizing Duchamp and Eliot’s
images into his own acerbic account of the folly of
these particular spectators. As a result, Dylan harnesses
people’s pre-existing thoughts of these cultural markers,
but asks them to couple, or reconcile, them in a literal
blending of art and theft.
When, in the succeeding, and final, verse, the speaker
refers to a “fiddler” who “now steps to the road/He
writes everything’s been returned which was owed,”
it is as if Dylan is also returning the images he has
“borrowed” in the song. In this respect, we could argue
that the song itself does the opposite of the museum it
criticises by collecting, or collating, fresh things in a state
of continual flux, rather than putting them in a place
where dust settles on antediluvian exhibits. As Pareles
argues, “Ideas aren’t meant to be carved in stone and
left inviolate; they’re meant to stimulate the next idea
and the next” (Pareles 1). One important feature, in this
respect, of the Blonde on Blonde album is a photograph
of Dylan with a pair of pliers in one hand and a painting
in the other that appears both on its back cover and in
the sleeve note:
Fig. 1: Photograph from back cover, and inside sleeve
note, of Blonde on Blonde, 1966.
The photograph seems to suggest that Dylan is about
to change, through creative force, the original image
and therefore serves as a pictorial metaphor for Dylan’s
objective to appropriate, and modify, cultural images
and return them to the public domain to allow people
to look at them in a different light.6 When Nicholas Roe
talks of Dylan’s hunger being for “another’s world and
others’ words”, referring to him as a “cultural ragman,”
(Corcoran 86), it strengthens the view that Dylan’s
ulterior artistic motive is in hybridizing art and theft in
creating anew.
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Changing the Image
One particular song that seems perpetually preoccupied
with the appropriation, defamiliarization, and
modification, of cultural images is that of “Desolation
Row” from Highway 61 Revisited. Where “Visions
of Johanna” can be seen as a song that touches upon
the idea of appropriating images, “Desolation Row,”
which is also keen to avoid stasis and the idea of images
setting, is a song seemingly devoted to it. The final song
on Highway 61 Revisited, “Desolation Row” is highly
unusual in its length and particularly distinctive in its
harmonic coupling of Dylan’s acoustic playing and
Mike Bloomfield’s electric improvisation. It is a song
where Dylan continually mixes the “image-cement” of
the past and present, always offering new takes on what
seem omnipresent cultural references. Frank Kermode
and Stephen Spender argue that, in “Desolation Row,”
“history [is] seen flat, without depth, culture heroes of
all kinds known only by their names, their attributes
lost by intergenerational erosion” (qtd. in Corcoran
34). “Desolation Row” has ten twelve-line verses
that contain what seem “a deliberate cultural jumble”
(Corcoran 34) — something equivalent almost to the
technique of horror vacuii employed by painters such
as Hieronymus Bosch. John Burns, making another
connection to Eliot (who appears in the song alongside
Ezra Pound), observes that “With its lovely, beguiling
melody and its seemingly endless parade of bizarre
characters, it is one of Dylan’s most memorable songs,
presenting perhaps his most sustained and complex
evocation of a phantasmagorical modern wasteland of
the soul” (36).
The song’s opening lines act to introduce listeners to the
strange world they are about to enter: “They’re selling
postcards of the hanging/They’re painting the passports
brown.”7 This macabre defamiliarization of normal
activity sets the mood of a song in which numerous
references to familiar activities take on sinister new
forms. What seems extraordinary, however, is the
number of allusions and references that the song makes
to mix high art and popular culture:
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • 24
‘Cinderella’ - title character from classic folk-tale
about recognition after oppression.
‘Bette Davis’ - American actress famed for playing
cold characters.
‘Romeo’ - one of the two ‘star-crossed lovers’ in
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597).
‘Cain & Abel’ - the two sons of Adam and Eve (in
the Hebrew Bible). ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ novel by Victor Hugo (1831).
‘Good Samaritan’ - biblical reference, connotes
‘loving thy neighbour’.
‘Ophelia’ - character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
(1603), potential wife of the eponymous hero.
‘Noah’ - biblical figure
‘Einstein’ - theoretical physicist and intellectual.
‘Robin Hood’ - heroic rebel in English folklore.
MICHAEL RODGERS
‘Phantom of the Opera’ - novel by Gaston Leroux
(published serially between 1909 and 1910).
‘Casanova’ - Venetian adventurer and author
synonymous with womanizing.
‘Titanic’ - doomed steamship that sank in 1912.
‘Nero’ - Roman emperor.
‘Neptune’ - Greek god of the seas.
‘Ezra Pound’ - major poet/figure of the modernist
movement.
‘T.S Eliot’ - major poet/figure of the modernist
movement, famed for The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock (1915) and The Waste Land (1922).
What is notable is that these references are not simply
given in a list fashion as provided above. Instead,
characters adorn costumes, cloaks, and disguises, often of
other cultural figures (Cinderella puts her hands into her
back pockets “Bette Davis style.” Einstein is disguised as
Robin Hood. The Phantom of the Opera is in a “perfect
image of a priest”). The effect is one that hybridizes
these disparate dramatic personae in ways that are both
hugely entertaining and particularly defamiliarizing.8 As
with the passages discussed from “Visions of Johanna,”
it is as if Dylan once again commandeers existing
preconceptions of cultural figures and transmogrifies
them into new characters (but with all their precedent
meaning). As Kermode and Spender note, it seems to be
only their names that have currency in this apocalyptic
world, perhaps testament to the persistence of cultural
icons in the public psyche.9 One particularly interesting
scenario related to this appears in the second verse:
Cinderella, she seems so easy
“It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
“You Belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place my
friend
You better leave”
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row (Dylan 1965, L13-24)
When Romeo enters the scene and proclaims “You
Belong to Me” to Cinderella, he seems to be conforming
not to the title character from Romeo and Juliet but to
the braggadocio image of our modern-day conceptions
of a “Romeo” (very close to the lustful, licentious
Casanova figure who enters in the seventh verse). The
meeting of these two cultural sources (Shakespeare and
fairytale) is wonderfully apt given the romantic theme
of both texts. However, when the Romeo of Dylan’s
song makes his possessive claim, it seems that the
sentiment is not acceptable to others in the song given
that the ambulances soon come to collect the wounded
character. The fact that this “someone” tells Romeo
that he is in the “wrong place” is laden with dramatic
irony: does the “someone” know who Romeo is (and
the play from which he comes), or is he simply asking
him to leave this peculiar place, one where ownership
and possessing simply do not exist, because of what
he has said? The paradox suggested in this verse is
reminiscent of “She Belongs To Me” not only through
Romeo’s assertion “You Belong to Me I Believe” (note
the capitalization), but also through the themes of theft
and art: is possession impossible in this realm, or is it
that everything belongs to everyone, therefore making
private ownership defunct?
The theme of ownership is also evoked in the penultimate
verse:
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row (Dylan 1965, L97-108)
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RELATIONSHIPS OF OWNERSHIP: ART AND THEFT IN BOB DYLAN’S 1960S’ TRILOGY
The above verse opens with an allusion to “Nero’s
Neptune” and refers to the two major poets of the
Modernist movement fighting it out in the captain’s tower,
perhaps for control over the direction of Modernism.
The explicit reference to Eliot is accompanied by a series
of references to the sea and seagoing, including one that
appears to allude to the conclusion of “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (Eliot
L124-131)
Eliot’s poem, like “Desolation Row,” is a dramatic
monologue: “A kind of poem in which a single fictional
or historical character other than the poet speaks to
a silent audience of one or more persons. Such poems
reveal not the poet’s own thoughts but the mind of the
impersonated character, whose personality is revealed
unwittingly” (Baldick 72). Arguably the most famous
exponent of the genre was Robert Browning and,
given the reference to “Nero’s Neptune,” the theme of
ownership (through the genitive case), and the genre
of “Desolation Row,” “My Last Duchess” (1842),
Browning’s most famous dramatic monologue, may also
be evoked. In Browning’s poem, the Duke of Ferrara,
who is in pursuit of a new duchess, tells the story of
his last duchess, whose portrait is hidden behind a
curtain, to an emissary (presumably of the prospective
duchess). His possessive nature, shown as a result of the
poem’s genre (as well as its content), reaches its peak at
the poem’s denouement where he points to one of his
prized art objects: a bronze statue of Neptune taming
a seahorse (could the duke’s Neptune be equated to
“Nero’s Neptune”?). “Desolation Row,” then, might be
said to make a set of generic and imagistic allusions to
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • 26
“My Last Duchess.” The song’s literary allusions to Eliot
and Browning once again indicate how Dylan seems
to appropriate literary images and characters, only to
subject them to the same distortion and doctoring as the
other popular or mythological figures. Eliot, for example,
is being laughed at as he struggles with Ezra Pound
(figures presumably unknown to the calypso singers).
Once more then, figures from high art are mixed with,
and undermined by, purveyors of popular culture.10
The theme of ownership evoked by the Browning
allusion is continued in the final verse, one that brings
the song to a climax:
MICHAEL RODGERS
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the doorknob broke)
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row (Dylan 1965, L109-120)
This verse serves to articulate just how despondent
the speaker has become and chastises the letter-sender
for his or her question because of how obvious the
answer seems to be. More interesting is the fact that the
speaker says that he knows the people that the lettersender refers to (arguably all the people that the listeners
have heard about in the previous eleven verses) and
that they are all “quite lame” (banal or worthless) and
that to spice them up he had to rearrange their faces
and give them all another name. What is important,
however, is that, by having the ability to change their
faces, personalities, and names, Dylan foregrounds his
own artistic prerogative of reworking and re-enlivening
cultural images of the past.11 The fact that these people
have been metaphorically brought into Dylan’s own
workshop and subjected to rigorous mannequin-work,
suggests that Dylan (and/or the speaker) now lays claim
to owning the reworked images. His frustration at how
stagnant these cultural figures of yore have become
(before the reworking) acts as a precursor to the final
two lines of the song, “Not unless you mail them/From
Desolation Row.” Given the second-person address, it
may be that Dylan is now referring to the listeners of the
song and, thus, it suddenly changes their position from
casual spectators to involved inhabitants of “Desolation
Row.” In doing so, Dylan not only changes the images
we thought we knew but also ends the song by
suggesting that his listeners, given their new proximity
to the aforementioned figures, may be subjected to the
very same metamorphosis, making the delayed inversion
all the more powerful and terrifying.
In the free-form poem included in the sleeve note to
Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan includes a question
supposedly asked by his recording engineer: “i’m here t’
pick up you and your latest works of art. do you need
any help with anything?” (3). There follows a “pause,”
a page of Dylan’s thoughts poured onto paper where
he tells us that “I am about t’ sketch You a picture of
what goes on around here sometimes,” and an “end of
pause” which is then followed by Dylan’s response “yes.
well i could use some help in getting this wall on the
plane” (6). Dylan alludes to the fact that everything he
has just talked about, the subject matter of his songs,
have been splattered, Jackson Pollock-style, on a cement
canvas that he now wants to transport. Thus, this
apparently static object, a hunk of wall, is being loaded
onto a plane bound for an unknown destination, and
arguably acts as a metaphor for how his images have
been collected and are in perpetual motion.12 Dylan has
appropriated these images and references and leaves it
up to the reader to guess where they will be dropped
again and, if so, what they will look or sound like.
When, in “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (1965),
Dylan sings “he not busy being born is busy dying,” he
seems to mean that things must be constantly reinvented
in order to escape decay. It seems to perfectly summate
his artistic practices and intentions: a predilection for
appropriating images, subjecting them to cultural
reworkings, and in perpetually challenging the concept
of artistic ownership.
Notes
1. See Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001) and “Art and the Moral Realm”
in Peter Kivy, The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Tom Sorell, Moral Theory and
Anomaly, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001); and
Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999).
2. D.A Pennebaker’s documentary about Dylan’s 1965
tour of Britain, was entitled “Don’t Look Back” (1967).
Also, in the sleeve note to Bringing It All Back Home,
Dylan talks about not wanting “t’ be bach. mozart. tol-
27 • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • IMAGINATIONS
RELATIONSHIPS OF OWNERSHIP: ART AND THEFT IN BOB DYLAN’S 1960S’ TRILOGY
stoy. joe hill. gertrude stein or james dean/[as]they are all
dead” (6), yet his proclivity for looking at the past for
inspiration is unquestionable.
3. A similar kind of meta-appropriation occurs in the
narration of Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Recruiting” (1935).
4.The fact that “Mona Lisa musta had the highway
blues” establishes a relationship between da Vinci’s
painting and the stretch of highway that runs from Louisiana to Minnesota, known also as “U.S Route 61.” It
appears a pun is being made here given the tradition of
blues music to appropriate.
5.The irony is that Duchamp’s “ready-made” work is
being used again. His other most famous “ready-made”
is Fountain (1917).
6.“Tombstone Blues” (1965) is similar in this inversion of perspective and sense (“The sun’s not yellow it’s
chicken”) and its inclusion of cultural figures (such as
Paul Revere, John the Baptist, Cecil B. DeMille). Also,
the line “bent out of shape by society’s pliers” from “It’s
Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” seems similar to figure
1’s sentiment; however, the song is concerned with the
stifling, negative effect of society rather than a creative
reworking.
7. These lines may refer to, respectively, the Duluth
hangings of the 1920s and that US government agents’
passports at this time were brown.
8. This switching of cloaks and disguises, reminiscent of
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night [1601-1603], also occurs in
“Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (1975).
9. In Bob Dylan: Chronicles Vol 1 (2004), Dylan observes: “I’d been raised in a cultural spectrum that had
left my mind as black as soot. Brando. James Dean.
Milton Berle. Marilyn Monroe. Lucy. Earl Warren and
Krushchev, Castro. Little Rock and Peyton Place. Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio” (35-36).
10. Dylan’s cultural jumble of creative output can be
IMAGINATIONS • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • 28
thought of as analogous to William Burroughs and his
“cut-up” technique — a figure who “was interrogating
the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least
imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all” (Lethem
60).
11. The idea of Dylan not allowing images or words
to stagnate can be seen in several instances, such as
in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965), where the
words that appear in the video differ from the published
lyrics (for example, “20 dollar bills,” “suckcess,” “man
whole,” “It don’t matter,” “It’s hard,” “Watch it!,” “Here
they come!,” “Dig yourself”). In the difference between
live performance and the published lyrics (for example,
specific words and emphasis in his performance of “Desolation Row” in Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall”
Concert; and in “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”
(1975) where the idea of “drillin’ in the wall” (verse
one), keeps pace with the narrative through verse eight
(“drillin in the wall kept up”) until the very end of the
song (“and cleaned out the bank safe, it’s said they got
off with quite a haul”).
12. A literal re-enactment of this scenario has taken
place now on numerous occasions in relation to Banksy’s
work, where people whose walls have been painted on
have cut out the wall in question (see Works Cited).
Works Cited
Baldick, Chris. The Concise Dictionary of Literary
Terms, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.
“Bansky Graffiti Removed from Wall.” BBC News Online 11th Feb 2008. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/
bristol/7238555.stm>. Web 12th August 2010.
Burns, John. Series of Dreams: The Vision Songs of Bob
Dylan. Kirkcudbright: Glen Murray Publishing, 2008.
Corcoran, Neil. ‘Do You, Mr Jones?’ Bob Dylan with
the Poets and Professors. London: Chatto and Windus,
2002.
MICHAEL RODGERS
Dylan, Bob. Bob Dylan: Chronicles (Vol 1). New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2004.
---
Blonde on Blonde, Columbia, 1966. CD.
---
CD.
Bringing It All Back Home. Columbia, 1965.
---
Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia, 1965. CD.
Eliot, T.S. Selected Poems. London: Harcourt Brace,
1964.
Lethem, Jonathan, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine, Feb 2007, 59-71.
Pareles, Jon. “Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?” New York Times, July 12th, 2003. <http://www.
nytimes.com/2003/07/12/arts/music/12DYLA.html>.
Web. 7 August 2010.
Trager, Oliver. Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob
Dylan Encyclopedia. New York: Billboard Books, 2004.
Wiletz, Sean. Bob Dylan in America. London: The
Bodley Head, 2010.
BIO
Michael Rodgers is in the final stages of his PhD
undertaking a Nietzschean analysis of Vladimir
Nabokov’s writings. He works as a Graduate Teaching
Assistant at the University of Strathclyde and is currently
editing a volume on ‘Nabokov and Morality’ derived
from a conference that he organized last year. His
article ‘Lolita’s Nietzschean Morality’ was published in
Philosophy and Literature in 2011 and he has another
forthcoming on the topic of Nabokov’s posthumous
novel The Original of Laura. He is a contributor to The
Literary Encyclopedia, the Slavonic and East European
Review and the Nabokov Online Journal.
BIO
Michael Rodgers est sur le point d’obtenir son doctorat
avec une analyse nietzschéenne des œuvres de Vladimir
Nabokov. Il occupe un poste d’auxiliaire d’enseignement
à l’Université de Strathclyde, où il édite actuellement
un volume dérivé d’un colloque qu’il a organisé
l’année portait de» by «s’intitulait de « Nabokov
et la moralité ». Il a publié un article intitulé Lolita’s
Nietzschean Morality dans Philosophy and Literature
en 2011, et il attend la publication d’un autre texte sur
le livre posthume de Nabokov L’original de Laura. Il est
contributeur à The Literary Encyclopedia, Slavonic and
East European Review et au Nabokov Online Journal.
29 • ISSUE 3-1, 2012 • IMAGINATIONS